John August

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Backing up is hard to do

QandA, So-Called Experts

questionmarkI just had the unfortunate happen: the dog pulled my laptop off the table by tripping across the power cord. Yeah. Anyhow, I lost a bunch of screenwriting materials because the fall damaged my harddrive beyond repair.

I’m learning the VERY hard way that backing up is not just a good “insurance policy” but a MUST. I thought it might be a subject you might shed some light on from your personal experience.

— Eric
Indiana

Like flossing, stretching, and updating your will, backing up your work is one of those unquestioned Good Ideas that’s pretty easy to ignore. It’s the law of delayed consequences: people tend to put off work that doesn’t have immediate gratification.

Honestly, I don’t back up nearly as much as I should. Or, “should.” If you read any computer magazine, they’re constantly harping on you to back up every night to a redundant RAID, then weekly to a tape drive, with off-site storage and whatnot.

Bah. My philosophy can be summarized in six words: What’s the worst that could happen?

It’s a revelation that came to me the last time I switched to a new computer. I dutifully dragged my files onto an external hard drive, ready to migrate them to their new home, when I realized that pretty much everything I needed on the new computer was either…

  • already installed, or
  • would need to be redownloaded for the most recent version.

The only item that needed to make the move was my “Projects” folder, a mere 500 megabytes. So why was I bothering with everything else? It was time to apply my new philosophy.

What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my applications and system software? Well, it would take a little more time to re-install them. But, I’d be saving a lot of time by not bothering to back them up every day/week/month.

What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my old projects? Well, I’d hate to lose them; they’re like old friends frozen in 12pt Courier. Beyond the emotional cost, I do occasionally need to refer back to them. So it’s worth the effort to periodically grab the folder off the server and copy it to my local hard drive. Likewise, every few months I burn a copy of the whole thing onto a CD-ROM and mail it to my mother in Colorado, figuring that if an asteroid wipes out California, at least future generations will be able to read what [SCOOBY-DOO](http://imdb.com/title/tt0267913/) was like before they cut it down to a PG rating. (Answer: much funnier.)

What’s the worst that could happen if I lost the current version of the project I’m working on? This is probably the worst-case scenario, because I’m generally on deadline and working for people with very little patience for technical difficulties. If I’m using my Powerbook, I’ll often email the file to myself as a backup, and also save it to my keychain drive. When I’m at home, I’ll often do the email trick, or copy items to my .Mac iDisk.

And then there’s the backups you don’t even plan. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a convincing argument that the best place for a tribal chief to store his surplus food is in his neighbor’s stomach. The same is true for data. (Go with me here.) Most of the scripts I work on these days travel around as .pdfs. One side benefit of this digitalization is that for any given script, some friend or assistant will invariably have a copy sitting in her mail. I sleep a little more soundly knowing that I could simply ask her to send it back.

In conclusion: Backing up is a waste of time, except for the few items for which it’s crucial. So worry about those, and not the rest.

Using a different font for the cover page on a script

Formatting, QandA

On your posted drafts of Go and Big Fish, you have a different font on the cover page for the title of the script. Since you have made it widely known that you use Final Draft, I assume that you used the “export to PDF” feature in Final Draft to do this. When I try to export using a font other than a standard font for the title (e.g. Courier, Courier New, Times New Roman, Arial, etc.), it saves that particular font as Arial or Times New Roman. How do you go about having those different fonts on the PDF versions of your scripts?

–John Herzog
Gotha, FL

The problem is specific to Final Draft for Windows. On Mac OS X, any program can export to .pdf from the Print dialog box, so What You See really is What You Get. It’s absurdly easy. All of the .pdf’s I make are done that way, rather than with Final Draft’s export command.

Obviously, I don’t know Windows as well as I know the Macintosh, but here are some possible solutions:

  1. Adobe Acrobat. Making .pdf’s is its job. But it’s not cheap.
  2. Find a third-party utility for making .pdf’s. Any good Windows shareware/demoware site should have something. Hopefully someone will suggest one in the comments.
  3. Find a (free?) utility for combining .pdf’s. On the Mac, a good free one is Preview; Window should have something like it. Generate a cover page in some other program that lets you save .pdfs, then use the combining utility to smack it onto the first page of your screenplay .pdf.

Of course, option four would be to get a Mac. But that’s probably overkill for this situation.

Discover the basics of title page formatting here!

When Final Draft won’t open under OS X

Geek Alert

I’m posting this in hopes of saving other screenwriters a few hours of potential frustration with Final Draft. After installing the OS X version, or upgrading your system software, or sometimes for no discernible reason at all, Final Draft will occasionally refuse to open. It bounces one or twice in the dock, then quits. Sometimes it gives you a message; other times it doesn’t.

Obviously, you can go through the help forums at Final Draft to look for an answer, but if you’re using the OS X version for Mac, first check for one specific thing: a corrupted font file.

courierfdIn the “Fonts” folder of your account’s “Library” folder (that is, John/Library/Fonts, rather than the main system-wide Library) look for the file “Courier Final Draft.” (Confused? Click the thumbnail to show you where to find this file.)

Drag the “Courier Final Draft” file to the trash. Log out, then log back in. Try to launch Final Draft. If it works, problem solved. Go to the website to download a non-corrupted version of Courier Final Draft, and put it in the main library’s fonts folder.

If that doesn’t work, make sure you’ve updated to the most recent version of Final Draft, then start digging through the support forums.

Ratio of pages to screen time

QandA, Words on the page

How do you (roughly) calculate the ratio of script length to screen time?
Would you use a different calculation for different genres?

–Rebecca

The very general rule is that a page in the script should equal a minute of screen time, which is one reason the industry has standardized around 12-point Courier for the font. Since most screenplays are around 120 pages, the movie should work out to be 120 minutes, or two hours, assuming every scene in the script makes it into the movie.

Of course, a page full of action would likely take longer than a minute, just as a page of rapid-fire dialogue would be a lot faster. That’s why before a movie goes into production, the script is often “timed” to estimate how long the movie will be, so the director and producers can plan accordingly.

A “script timer” is a professional reader who estimates how long each scene will play, and thus, the length of the overall movie. Generally, the script timer will take into account the director’s vision and style when timing the scenes; the David Lynch version of a scene would tend to run longer than the Michael Bay version.

Many script timers are in fact the script supervisors, who will be set during the entire production helping the director, actors and editors maintain continuity and catch mistakes. From the screenwriter’s perspective, this is one of the most important people on the set, since he or she always has the director’s ear, and will be the person correcting actors who mangle their lines.